


No Hard Feelings

by ineffablenerd



Category: Rusty Quill Gaming (Podcast)
Genre: Ace!Zolf, Asexual Character, Canon Asexual Character, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Feelings, M/M, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unrequited Love, Unrequited Lust, aromantic!Wilde, asexual!Zolf, suicidal behaviour
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-02
Updated: 2020-10-02
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:27:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26774368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ineffablenerd/pseuds/ineffablenerd
Summary: When Zolf told Hamid he never hooked up with Wilde it wasn't a lie. But it wasn't the whole truth either.
Relationships: Robert Ross / Oscar wilde, Zolf Smith & Oscar Wilde, Zolf Smith/Oscar Wilde
Comments: 10
Kudos: 37





	No Hard Feelings

**Author's Note:**

> *sees Oscar Wilde's scar in season four* It's free real estate.  
> No Beta means this is probably full of Typos and stuff.  
> Thanks go out to the entire Rusty Quill Discord Server. Y'all are the best.

It had only been a few months after the World really turned to shit when Oscar Wilde showed up at Zolf's door. Well the door of the shitty inn at yet another stormy coast he was staying in. Wilde told him about the party. That they were missing, presumed dead, that Bertie had died mere days after Zolf left. That Hamid had figured out a Name for them.  
Zolf barely registered any of it. He didn't let himself grieve for Hamid and Sasha.  
Not yet.  
There was too much to do, too many people were grieving at once. Someone needed to stay on top of things.  
So he followed Wilde. Met up with Barnes and Carter. Worked with them.  
They were not Hamid and Sasha. Neither was Wilde. Zolf thought he would hate them all more, but there was not much space for animosity between people on the same side.  
Barnes had only done his job when Zolf got court marshalled. Carter, as annoying as he was, was one of the few assets they had. And Wilde was... actually ok, if you got to know him. As much as Zolf wanted to think differently, Wilde wasn't actually a bad person. he could be flippant and annoying, yes. And he barely ever got straight to the point. But the facade of puns and one liners wasn't any more than that. A facade. Especially now that his magic was gone.  
At the beginning Zolf could catch him snap his fingers to clean something up, only to slump down when he realised that that was not an option anymore.

No one ever mentioned it.

As the months went past, they all got weary. Every new person they met and every time anyone came back from a mission everyone had to be vetted. Quarantined. Detained. And _inspected_.  
It wasn't a fun process for anyone involved. Barne's and Carter's bickering was only entertaining for so long before it got tiring, and there was just no good news. Ever. There was bad news, there was worse news, and there was no news. Those were the worst. Another messaging system broken down, another person taken but not confirmed.  
No news were the scariest.

And then, one day, some guy showed up. Robert Ross he called himself. A young british sounding gentleman here to see Wilde. And Wilde stopped caring about procedure.  
It was so obviously suspicious.  
They give you a loved one, someone who knows things about you and within a Week they have you. They all knew that by now.  
And still Wilde insisted it would be fine. No one could stop him. Any reminder of why these procedures were there fell on deaf ears.

"He was travelling the World! He was nowhere near Europe! It will be fine! It's _Robert_!" This man was someone to Wilde. It was so obvious for everyone.

And it came like it had to. Only three days later they heard the screams. When they reached Wilde's room, half dressed, weapons at the ready, it was already over. Oscar had a massive gash on his face, and his _friend_ had a knive in his chest. Blue Veins clearly visible over the top of his unbuttoned collar.

Burns and Carter burned the body, while Zolf healed Wilde's face and locked him up in the Quarantine Cell. He didn't protest. Every ounce of facade was gone now.  
The man sitting on the floor in an unbottoned shirt and no socks, shared barely his face with the overconfident Bard Zolf threatened to drown in a Bucket so so long ago.  
He tried to say something, comfort him in some way, but he wasn't good with words at the best of times. And these times were rather the opposite. At least he didn't say "I told you so." that was not what Wilde needed to hear right now. He scrounged up enough tact for that. So he just quietly handed Wilde one of his novels and a bottle of _something_ to drink through the bars and turned to go back upstairs.

"Can you stay? Please." the small voice barely sounded like Wilde at all "We don't need to talk, I just... nevermind."

"I'll get some more books. Maybe a crossword. Then I'll come back down." Wilde nodded just barely. He looked so much younger than he normally seemed. Zolf knew dwarven and human ages didn't really match up, but for the first time he realised he probably had at least two decades on Wilde. He was probably still older even with their relative life-spans considered.  
Maybe he could make a joke about that at some point. Make Wilde smile just a little bit.

The next few days were excruciatingly tense and boring.  
After Barnes and Carter had come back from getting rid of Ross's Body, they all decided it would be best if those two quarantined as well, as they had handled the body the most. As they had been together the entire time but Wilde had not they had a conundrum on their hands.  
Either put all three in one cell, risk cross-contamination and definitely risk them all being at each others throat within hours because three adult Humans were way too many for that cell or separate Wilde from the other's somehow.  
The decision was easy: Wilde was already wearing the anti-magic cuffs, so the benefit of keeping him in the improvised anti-magic cell were limited.  
So they just locked him in a spare bedroom, his own was too full of paperwork and information.  
And still hadn't been cleaned of all the blood.  
Zolf had to pick up everything else. He cooked, he cleaned Wilde's bedroom/office, he did the daily inspections. It had been long enough that no one was really embarrassed about those anymore. It was just a fact of life that sometimes you have to strip naked and turn around in front of your colleague to see if you have been infected by a magical brain rot that destroyed most of europe.  
But when he wasn't doing everyone's jobs Zolf sat next to Wilde's door and read. He had retrofitted it to be metal bars on the top half, so he could look inside. Privacy was not a privilege of the quarantined. Wilde didn't talk and barely acknowledged that Zolf was there. The only noises he made that entire week was the turning of pages and the soft clank of binding on wood, when he indicated he finished one book and wanted to start the next.

In the end, none of them were infected. Small victories.  
They still had to move camp. Always a hassle. At least they had a bag of holding to put the paperwork and the Anti-Magic components that could be salvaged from the improvised cell.  
It was nothing they hadn't done before. Locations got compromised all the time.  
But Wilde had changed. He began working through nights even when there was no new information to work with. He avoided any talk with anyone that wasn't the bare minimum about the next mission.  
Zolf tried to keep up the habit of reading in the same room as Wilde without talking, just so he could keep an eye on him. They couldn't afford to lose him to what ever Wilde thought this trajectory would bring them. Wilde ignored him. But he didn't throw him out either. Zolf knew he wasn't wanted in that room. It didn't stop him. Maybe he'd find some helping words some day, but for now, the fragile silence, broken only by rustling paperwork and turned pages, was the only thing that kept Wilde from completely isolating himself.  
The days ticked on. And Wilde withered. Without the use of prestidigitation he couldn't hide how ashen his face turned. How deep the circles under his eyes. He barely ate. No one ever saw him go to sleep. Not even Zolf who tried spending as much time as possible in Wilde's office. But their work didn't allow for that much downtime and other than Wilde, Zolf just didn't have a lot of paperwork to busy himself with, and he had to sleep to be of any use.

This went on for Weeks, until finally after cleaning the kitchen after a lonely lunch, with Barnes and Carter out on a mission, Zolf returned to Wilde's office for his afternoon "read and pretend not to watch Wilde destroy himself." to find him face down, passed out on the floor.

"Fuck, Wilde! Oscar! FUCK!" he dropped his novel and sprinted over, dropping to his knees with a metal clank, channeling positive energy and laying on hands at the same time.  
Wilde started groaning and Zolf propped him up in a somewhat seated position against the wall, trying not think about how way too light Oscar was for a man his size.

"What the fuck did you _do_?" he gave the still only half conscious Wilde a quick once over. There were no obvious wounds, but his anti-magic cuffs were undone. Zolf swore again and moved down to Wilde's legs to close them again.

"I can work faster if I can do magic." Wilde's arms weakly flopped as if to stop him. His voice was almost too quiet to be heard.

"You'll also die faster. Is that what you want? Huh? Is that what you're doing in here all day? Killing yourself?" Zolf was done with the cuffs now and turned back to Wilde's face.  
He was crying. This was not a situation Zolf was equipped to handle, but neither was anyone else in this house. So he put his hands on Wilde's shoulders and shook him a little.

"We need you here with us. You're the only one who can read that stupid fancy handwriting of yours."  
Wilde didn't react to the nag.

"I almost killed all of us." other than the tears, there was no emotion on Wilde's face. A crying corpse.

"So has Barnes. So has Carter. Several times." Zolf frantically searched for what Wilde might need to hear.

"I killed Robert." at this point Wilde's corpse like demeanor finally broke and he slumped onto Zolf's shoulder, sobbing. Zolf just held him there.

"It wasn't him anymore. You know it wasn't. He was already gone." the movement on his shoulder could have been a nod, could have been a sob. Zolf decided to continue. "If anything you brought him peace. Now they can't use him anymore." the sobbing continued. Zolf doubted his great soothing powers were doing their thing.

They stayed like that for a while, Zolf thought about patting Wilde on the back but it didn't really seemed fitting.  
After a while the sobbing calmed down a bit.

"I left _him,_ did you know that?" Wilde's muffled voice wasn't steady, but at least the sobbing had stopped for now.  
"I thought he was too young for me." there was a noise like a choked chuckle.  
"He had never seen anything of the World. He hadn't ever been to Paris... I think he hadn't even seen much of England and I wanted new exciting things. I had this great job I knew would send me to the edges of the meritocratic world and he just wanted to settle down in the countryside."

Wilde sat up now. Lifting his head from Zolf's shoulder and leaning back against the wall. His eyes were still red and full of tears, but the talking seemed to help.

"I told him he should go see the World and maybe then I'd reconsider. That I'd needed a taste of all the options first." he almost sounded like himself again now. "I never saw him again. I don't even know if he _did_ go see the world."

"I... I'm sorry Oscar." Zolf had rarely been _this_ out of his depth for comforting words. "I-I'm sure he did. Have a good time I mean. Before everything went wrong."  
The fact that he didn't have a feet and _still_ managed to put them in his mouth was astonishing.

"Yeah..." Oscar trailed off, finally taking in the position they were sat in.  
"I wasn't trying to kill myself."  
"Well that's good to hear at least." a little bit of the tension left Zolf's body.  
"I was just trying to make it up to you. the fact that I screwed up."  
"By killing yourself."  
Oscar pointedly looked away and didn't answer. Scanning over the office and the strewn around paperwork he apparently dropped when he had passed out.  
Zolf did the only thing he could think of in that moment, put his hands on either side of Wilde's head and pressed their foreheads together, giving Wilde no way to look away.  
"Yes you screwed up. The procedures were there for a reason and you ignored them. Tough Luck. You're not special for that. That's their entire _scheme_. They find exactly who you would break the rules for and that's how they get you. That doesn't mean you get to give up and stop being a person. We need you here. Not just your stupid paperwork. _You_. If you kill yourself for some paperwork redemption ark, that means you leave me alone with Barnes and Carter and I would never forgive you for that."

Wilde's hands grabbed onto Zolf's shirt and suddenly they weren't connected forehead to forehead but mouth to mouth.  
There was a wild desperation in Oscar's kiss. Like the world depended on it.

Zolf's thoughts raced through a lot of thoughts in a very short time Wilde was kissing him? Wilde was kissing him. Had he ever thought about kissing Oscar Wilde before? No, not really. But thinking about kissing people wasn't really a thing he did. Outside of wondering if there were actual people that really had feelings like the people in Harrison Campbell's novels. Maybe making the leap to if any one real person really felt like that it would be Wilde. Did it feel wrong? Actually no. It was nice actually. He didn't have any real experience with kissing but if that's what it was like then that was cool. Was that what they called heat of the Moment? There wasn't any actual heat though. And it was _Wilde_ who was kissing him. Would this change a lot of things? Did he care if this changed a lot of things? Not right now he didn't really. Things had changed before and they would change again no matter if he was part of the decision or not.

And, almost without hesitation, he kissed back.

His hands were in Wilde's hair and on his neck now, and Wilde's efforts intensified. There were tongues there now, and without any frame of reference, Zolf matched his movements to Wilde's. His mouth left Zolf's and before he could even notice the cold air where warm lips had been, said lips found their way underneath his ear and slowly down his neck where moments (hours? Years?) earlier it had been stained with tears.  
Meanwhile Oscar's fingers started making quick work of the buttons on Zolf's shirt. It was just a simple henley so there weren't that many buttons to take care of. It was only when he started pulling the shirt up out of where it was tucked in, that Zolf remembered where this kind of scene led in the novels and it stopped him in his tracks.

"Oscar... stop."  
Wilde didn't seem to hear him, having found a very good spot right in the crook of Zolf's neck.  
He tried pulling away. He didn't want to stop what was happening right now, but he didn't want to go where this was going either.

"Oscar! No! Stop!" and Wilde begrudgingly stopped. His eyes were on fire as he wiped across his mouth with the back of his hand. They kept flicking back to Zolf's lips, his neck, the open part of his shirt.

"What."

"I can't do this." Zolf rapidly realized how much Wilde was draped over him at this point.

"I can show you how no problem." and he tried to go back to it.

"No. Oscar. I don't want to do this."

"Oh." Wilde actually pulled back now.  
He looked confused, disappointed, and _hurt_.

"If you're not into men, _or me_ , why did you kiss me back then?" it sounded almost like a challenge.

"I don't know." Zolf tried to sort his thoughts.  
"It's not that I didn't like _that_ , I just don't like where this is going."

"Why?"

"I don't know!" and he didn't.  
"I'm supposed to right? I'm supposed to want _this_ " pointing to his dishevelled shirt.  
"I'm supposed to relate to what the people in Campbell's novels feel right? That's a thing people actually do and feel?"

"Are we opening a book club now?"

"Oscar I'm serious."

"Well." Wilde untangled his legs from where they somehow had straddled over Zolf's knees and leant back against the wall.  
"Yes, and no. Yes the feelings in the romance novels have real world equivalences, but no, real life isn't as dramatic as that."

"Well I don't feel like that at all. I don't want to do that."

"Huh."

"Yeah."

"So this" Wilde gestured at their no longer entangled position, and his own reddened face "does nothing for you?"

"Well, No. Not like I think you mean it." Zolf could feel himself blush.

"I've got to say I've never gotten this far and then gotten rejected before."

"Glad to have helped broaden your experiences." Wilde playfully hit him against the shoulder then started laughing. First a bit manically but then it sounded just relieved. Zolf laughed as well. This situation was too ridiculous not to.  
After a while Wilde calmed down a bit.

"So you don't have a crush on me."

"What? No. Not that I know of?"

"People normally know if they have a crush on someone."

"Well I don't, ok? How would I know."

"You kept trying to spend time with me!"

"I was worried about you! I care about you and neither Barnes nor Carter are the kind of people you can rely on keeping someone potentially suicidal alive. Out of all of us disasters somehow I have to be the one that understands other people's feelings!"

"You're really bad at it."

"I _know_."

"Damn shame. I haven't had a thing with a dwarf in a very long time. They're so _sturdy_." Wilde shakely tried standing up and failed.  
He was still weak even with all that divine energy pumped into him. He sighed.

"Sorry, I guess?" Zolf got up and offered Wilde a hand. He took it.

"Nothing to be sorry about. Never apologize for these kinds of things."

"I'll try to keep that in mind." They both stood there for a while hands still clasped at the other's forearms. With nowhere to go from here.

"Well..." Zolf let go and crossed his arms, then put his hands in his pockets, then just let them hang there.

"I'll go start making dinner I guess." The sun was still up 

"Sure." Wilde was still leaning against the wall. Zolf was already turning towards the door then stopped.

"Oscar?"

"yes." He still hadn't moved. The colour that had livened up his face during the _situation_ was patchy now.

"Please go take a nap. A real one." Wilde scoffed.

"Only if you kiss me good night."

"Are you serious?" Zolf felt himself blushing again

"Just this once and we'll never speak of it again." at last the light behind Wilde's eyes was back, and Zolf was mostly sure he was kidding.

"Fine." and he grabbed Wilde by the collar, pulled him down to his level and kissed him one last time. then he let go and immediately turned around and left the room.

"Good Night Oscar." his voices sounded much more sure of himself than he was feeling.  
"I'll wake you when there's food and if you don't eat it I will force you."

**Author's Note:**

> Do I take canon or implied asexual characters and make them go through things I either went through or am scared of to cope with my own feelings about my feelings? Yes. Maybe. You can't stop me.
> 
> I really tried to leave this open and let it be but Zolf/Wilde lives rent free in my head so there's more of this to come.


End file.
